Students learn to inspire, empower

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Students from various schools perform in a dance competition Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Dr. Phil Campbell, left, talks to students about the understanding that each person has value Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

Chillicothe High School hosted multiple schools Friday, March 31, 2017, during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.
Jess Grimm/Gazette

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Students from various schools perform in a dance competition Friday during a M.A.D.E. Leadership Program event. The event featured a mixture of fun and learning with speakers including Gary VonKennel, Dr. Phil Campbell, Mike Smith and more.(Photo: Jess Grimm/Gazette)Buy Photo

CHILLICOTHE - The more than 1,100 students from 11 schools who crowded into Hatton Memorial Gymnasium Friday morning have already been lauded as good leaders for their decision to take part in the drug-free clubs movement.

Dr. Phil Campbell, a Tennessee educator, principal, and motivational speaker, shared with them how they can become great.

"Great leaders have the ability to inspire the hopeless and empower the dreamers," Campbell said, adding that one of the most powerful things the students attending could do is "move somebody about three inches" — or do something, no matter how small, that puts another person on a better path.

Campbell's remarks were part of a morning-long Jostens Leadership Conference attended by students from schools in several counties active in the drug-free clubs initiative. The program included plenty of humor — both in the stories shared by featured speakers and through a dance contest that even brought club advisers and teachers onto the stage to the students' delight — but it carried a far-reaching message. Put simply, speaker after speaker made sure the students understood that everyone has value.

But this was not simply about asking the assembled teens to look for and recognize that value in themselves, as similar assemblies so often do. This one urged them to discover it in someone else, then lead others to see it and celebrate it, too. That means reaching out to the kid who always sits in the back of the class silently with head down not talking to anybody or who sits alone at a lunch table and then showing the person he or she has value.

Mike Smith, founder of Skate for Change and several other ventures, offered an example from his life. As a senior basketball player, he would arrive at his school in Nebraska at 6 a.m. every morning to work out in the gym and would walk past a freshman sitting, head down, by his locker at that early hour. After walking past the boy several days, he would stop and ask the kid to join him in his workouts, only to be politely, but repeatedly, be told no.

Eventually, Smith decided to ask his mother why she thought the boy kept refusing him and got a discouraging insight into himself he hadn't seen before. Using that, he decided to sit down with the boy and get to know him, learning that Calvin, arrived to school that early so he wouldn't miss the free breakfast he could get and that because of issues with other classmates going back to middle school, he would get his lunch about 10 minutes early and sit in an empty classroom alone to eat it, then at the end of the day go home to play by himself.

Smith befriended Calvin and brought him into his circle of friends on the basketball and football teams, and to this day the two remain very close.

"Calvin will never be able to mentally process how important he was to me," Smith said. "I thought I saved Calvin. No way, that kid saved me. That kid changed my entire life."

Smith had several other items of wisdom to share with the students, asking them to stand for something and to understand that helping people happens when nobody else is watching. He said people tend to fall into three types — those who wish for something different in their lives, those who talk about what they're going to do but never do it and those who take action. He urged them to be the latter.

"You've got to understand something, every one of you kids can do this, there's nothing special about me standing up here today," he said, noting he was never a very good student. "... The reason that I get to do this stuff is because I got off Facebook, Twitter and Instagram a long time ago and I literally put dirt under my fingernails and just got to work, and I didn't expect anybody to do it for me. I didn't expect anybody to help me; I knew I had to do these things on my own."

There were several other messages scattered throughout the program. Campbell spoke passionately about the fact that everyone has value and offered suggestions for school teachers and administrators regarding how they can change the culture in the schools to celebrate that value. Chillicothe High School graduate Gary VonKennel, who was the driving force behind the creation of CHS' Keys to Success program, said it wasn't enough to just say no to drugs but to offer an emphatic no and walk away, taking friends away from the danger as well.

To close the program, 1980 CHS graduate Rev. J. Troy Gray was honored with a large Chillicothe History Maker plaque for his years of service to the Chillicothe community and for having been the youngest ever to be elected to the Chillicothe City Schools Board of Education in 1989 and the first African-American president of the board. He offered brief, but impassioned, remarks to the students and reminded them they are somebody, they are special, that they can do anything if they take God with them and that they can always change their path in life.